>> Eccentric Sensorialities

3rd July - 18th October, 2010 One of the last essays written by Raoul Hausmann, La sensorialité excentrique (published by the poet Henri Chopin in 1969) was a plea for mankind to go beyond egocentric senses and vanquish the barriers between physical reality and immaterial thought.

"Our aim is to attain a new primordial state, a new presence. Elements of language and vision will then impinge on us in new ways. Our world requires that we respond to it with new primordial signals - and we should rise to that challenge. So far, we only know how to stutter ineffectually in this novel language, but all the same we can declare the transitory period of abstraction is now over. Fast approaching is a period of synthesis when we will be able to combine light and sound vibration in a single unified form…". Hausmann envisaged these ideas in the context of a new ethical system that refused to accept that progress necessarily leads to happiness, stating baldly that "...Mankind's attempt to impose order can only end in suicide !".

The exhibition at Rochechouart takes Hausmann's essay as its starting point, proposing a subjective exploration of his propositions through a selection of works from the same period (psychedelia, fluxus, concrete poetry) and extending them with examples of contemporary art.